INTRANET TOUR | Putting Users First @ Shepley Bulfinch

Right.

Let'S do this. My name is Susan Strom, and I'm the Chief Client Officer at Knowledge Architecture. And with me today is Jess Purcell, the Design Technology Manager at Shepley Bulfinch. And you are in a intranet tour where we share stories of how clients are using synthesis to help evolve and grow their AEC firms. Today, we're spotlighting Sheffley Bulfinch, a firm that invests in continuous improvement and knowledge management, two topics we'd love to talk about. Their Internet Finch is the hub for many things. Documentation, architectural tools and practices, firmwide initiatives, and connecting with colleagues. And because it's so successful, it keeps growing. Jess is going to take us behind the scenes on some of the changes she and others have made to ensure that knowledge keeps flowing even as that stream of knowledge is getting bigger. Our guide, Jess primary focus at Shepley lies in enhancing design, delivery, and collaboration processes. In addition to her work in knowledge management, she's also a leader in VR data analytics and process automation. Additionally, she has a Master's of Architecture from Arizona State University. If you have questions for Jess as we go, please add them to the Q and A feature in the Zoom toolbar. We'll try to get to as many as possible before we wrap up at 1245 Pacific. I'm sorry, 1145 Pacific. Jess, thank you for joining us today and sharing everything that you've been up to at Synthesis.

Yeah, thanks, Susan. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen now. Let me know if we're good.

Looks like it's loading at IC Bench.

Okay, perfect. All right, thanks for coming, everyone. Just a little background on shepley. We're about 200 people. We're an architecture and interior design firm with five studios or offices across the United States, plus a virtual studio. So that makes us a hybrid company. And Finch has really been. We've been on synthesis for almost 10 years now, which is wild. But Finch has been really critical for us as a way to connect across all those offices and now virtually. So I want to tell a little story about. We just recently migrated to synthesis 6, and really, when you're migrating and you've been on a platform for nine years, I've heard a lot of analogies in, like, the migration spotlights of moving house, and it's absolutely what it felt like, but in a way, you have two audiences. So we have everyone that we're moving their stuff and they have to find it again. But also the fact that now we have the mega menu. We can start to look at how we're organizing our content, which is a different strategy maybe than we had nine years ago. And you have future hires. How do they find new stuff on the platform? So one of the things we had before was all of our communities were the groups that own the content. And so it was a lot of like trying to figure out where stuff lived. And with synthesis 6 and seeing a lot of other intranet tours, we and the template, we saw a lot of grouping by content and topic. So all of time and travel is together, you know, all of technology is together and you don't have to guess who owns what thing. So also that means that stuff got moved. Instead of our practice groups owning content, we actually even pulled all of standards out into one place. And one of the things you can see is like bin standards no longer lives under a resident user group. Technical documentation doesn't live under our technical advisory group. But with the ability to link, you can still actually get to it from there. And we had a. Our revit user group does a show and tell monthly and they were talking about BIM execution plans and standards. And in the session they were like, well, if you go to the RUG page and you go to BIM standards, that's how you get to it. Which it's like, on the one hand we moved it out of rug, but on the other hand it doesn't actually matter. So I correct them because as long as people find, it doesn't matter where it lives. So one of the other things, we were meeting with Turner Fleischer in the middle of our migration and I was really impressed with the level of control and consistency they had. I even directly stole their plan to have icons be internal and then logos as external. But we even wanted to make consistency across pages. So it didn't matter if you understood who RUG was. You knew that navigation was here, you know about them, you know who they are, and you know that if a group has a team site, it's always this bottom link. So then it doesn't matter if they're a working group like rug, if they're a department like people in development, if they're a practice group like our education group, even if it's a sub page of content and not a community, because our users don't necessarily need to know what a community is versus the page. Everything is laid out the same, regardless of who you are. So with the ability to link across things, we really kind of move to a search first strategy. A lot of people were like, oh well, I'm getting used to finding things, but I feel like I'm relying on search a lot, which is a very interesting generational comment because, like, it's okay as long as you're finding what you need, but younger generations are very much search first. So I kind of wanted to highlight some of the things we've been doing. So like I said, you can even look for BIM standards and it will come up. You can even do on our homepage, we have like all of our quick access resources here. But maybe you didn't know that's where it was. And so if you were searching for, like, I just need to get to Bamboo to update my address. We've actually added an external link as a best bet. So then you're not going to a page about Bamboo to click the Bamboo link. You're actually getting there from the search. So that's kind of an interesting thing that I think people should really look into is this search optimization. It's really not just about, like, synonyms like travel and like corporate traveler. You can also use it for, like, groups, you can use it for documents, you can use it for people, and you can use it for external links. So how do you take advantage of that search bar to get people to things that are not necessarily pages? And in addition to those two audiences, there's really like a third secret audience. And that's all the people who are community managers and editors. They really are kind of vast in the way that we have been around for nine years. So we have people who have been championing their groups like Revit User group, our technical group. They have a lot of content. They have a vibrant community. And so for them, it was really about, like, helping them understand where their stuff went, how to edit it, how to keep going. And then we even had groups that maybe didn't have a lot of content or groups that maybe overturned. Are we got new VPs in the middle of this for accounting and people in development. So it wasn't about like a, oh, we reorganized your stuff by topic. It was, here's what you have. Let's talk through it and let's talk about how to add more. One of the groups we had that was a little bit newer is our design Exchange. And they're really more about conversations and sharing and being creative. Right. So they don't have a lot of wiki pages that are how to do design. Right. It's more about conversations around design. So when we met with them for their onboarding, they were like, well, we don't have a Lot of content, which is absolutely not true because they run events, they have a book club, and they also have this series they call Archa Tapas. For every Monday morning, they post a little case study and things about it, and then there's vibrant conversations on them. So how do we build pages to kind of curate their content? Because if you're sharing and you're doing the work, you are making content. So how do we build a place where you can see that collectively instead of just sifting through everything on their homepage? That is all of the things they're doing. So one of the things we also did to kind of support the different range of people, we were thinking, what better place to talk about Finch than on Finch? So this is our first foray into private communities. We met with Kyle and Anthony at Civil Tech and they were very gracious and showed us their community for community champions. And it was really inspiring to see, like, the level of engagement they had. And I'm hoping we get to that point. Point. But right now it's mostly resources because we just launched it a couple weeks ago. But in addition to standards and editing FAQs. So this is like, directed towards people who used to edit on Finch. Here's your new expectations and how to get moving. There's also resources from Synthesis and from KA that are really around, like, here's how to get started. It's also an opportunity for us to build our own resources. So templates for the little circle icons. We're even going to add templates for if you need to build an org chart for your department that'll be standardized. And rather than expecting people to just come up with that stuff, we can actually host those resources on Finch. So we do a lot. We're doing a lot of thinking around how do we learn within our company. And so we've launched a couple years ago a group called Bird Feeder. I hope you're all ready for all of the bird names. So Bird Feeder is a home for all of our learning content. They also create. And they create content. They help experts make content, they curate what we're going to do in the future. And so they have their course catalog on here. And one of the decisions we've made is it's organized both by, you could have learning tracks, but experience profile, which aligns with our professional development series. So within this, we've actually gone the route of doing pages for everything and guides rather than doing a video library. And one of those things is it's really important for us to capture context. So we have so many different types of content that we run that it's really important to us to capture everything around it. So rug debates are one that we're really proud of. It's a very low prep, very fun and engaging session where we take two experts, make them represent a very extreme side on something and then they do get out. But one of the interesting things about debates is that the teams chat is actually much livelier. And so half of it is these two experts talking and the other half is actually people sharing stories in chat, giving examples of things they've run into, asking questions, and then other revit users are also answering those questions. Not necessarily the experts that are on the stage. We can have a live poll going where people can actually vote and then they can jump sides so we grab like a screenshot before and after. But if you just had that video somewhere, you would miss all of the things that happened around it. You would also miss like we, we can include posts because it's a guide, we can include all the other things in that series. And so you have like a much broader like view of the things that make something happen as well as the engagement around it. Another example is we'll do short 20 minute, 30 minute pre recorded sessions. They don't have to be live. So we ran an Excel 101 early last year and those actually went out as posts. And so if you, if we just made a document library that was all of the videos from Excel101, you would miss all of the comments and questions that were in that post. So this is a way that we kind of, you know, pull a post block, capture the series as a whole and you get that context. Some of the things that I like doing, in addition to playing around with how do we do live sessions? I've been thinking a lot about how do we make FINCH more engaging. So some of the things we've been doing for a few years now is actually building Miro boards and then embedding those in iframes in Finch. So this is our getting started in Affinity series. And what we did is we actually built these like fly out breakaways of the user interface for affinity. So rather than you having to go in and click around to figure out where something is, you can actually see all of the menus next to each other. And it's a way to kind of like zoom in and zoom in and zoom in that you wouldn't necessarily get on a page unless you did a lot of screenshots. And even then it's kind of not Linear. So this gives us the ability to kind of do like, drill down content within Finch and not have to go somewhere else. This was pretty successful and we actually started doing it for all of our studios too. So say you're going to go into Phoenix, you want to see the full floor plan, right? But you also maybe want to know what is available at each desk, what's available in each conference room. So you've got like a legend of like, what monitors are available, what's in the conference room. So you can zoom in and out and see like what's available to you before you even reach a space in a way that like, it's much more playful and engaging. And the last thing I kind of want to talk about is a current experience experiment we're doing. I was doing a lot of Instagram and TikTok as you do and thinking about how do we pull in that kind of quick learning and engaging fast, like scrolling in a corporate environment. That feels authentic. And so to me, you're already scrolling through synthesis, we're scrolling through Finch. And you know, you get a long post and you're like, oh, I don't know that I have time to read that. But maybe it really only took you like two minutes to read. How does that feel as like a one minute video? So you click in, you watch the video, you're still in your feed and you keep scrolling. So to me, short form video, it's not like, oh, TikTok dancing, right? I think it's horizontal instead of vertical. It's very edited down. You're not talking about everything about a topic. And this is a huge skill that we've been learning while we've been running these is how do you really edit it down to a minute and a half of just what you need to know. So one of the things we did is actually even in the vein of a TikTok video or an Instagram video, is just three ways you can use AI right now. And so I'm going to turn the volume off and speed this one up. But you can get an idea of like, you know, horizontal instead of vertical. So it fits within the post. Well, big captions, because maybe you're in the studio and you don't have your headphones on and so you can't listen to audio. Like, being able to read those captions and be able to like engage with the video at the same time is really helpful. Having links to other things. And again, like, you can see people like posting questions and asking things. It lives within that post. And like I showed before with some of the other guys, like this is a page with all of these curated, but it's also just like live on the feed. We just had our first feeder group, did a series of Bluebeam tips and tricks for March and they also had a video. They didn't do audio. So there's so many strategies for like the creators, like what they feel comfortable with. If you don't feel comfortable doing audio, you know, that's okay. Text is more engaging. Again, in that like corporate environment, sometimes you don't have the ability to listen to a video. You just want to see and read it. You know, this is skills we're developing, but I think as we develop these skills, Anita for an example, she was saying that, you know, it took her a few hours this time, but I think as she develops those skills, it could be maybe an hour to do this. And if you were writing a really technical post or wiki, any of you out there who've done it, you know, sometimes they take days. So is it faster and then easier for people to follow? They can actually watch where your mouse goes, they can pause, they can scroll back, they can move forward, they can watch it faster. And it's just, I think it's going to be a much more engaging and easy way to share knowledge than some of the ways we've been doing it. We've also got, when we rolled out New Finch, everything was short videos in a post, but I also built a welcome to New Finch page and the videos embedded on that page too. So all this content is reusable in multiple places. We had a previous page that was how to use the Synthesis mobile app, but now it's about how to get to Fringe on your phone, you know, and this video is there too, so it's all over the place. And it's short and it's fast and it's easy to follow. The next thing we want to try is I'm going to be very vulnerable and talk about my algorithm. Other than a lot of videos of dogs, I watch a lot of DIYers both on Instagram and on YouTube. And so you'll get like the little 30 second video of like, here's how I made this or here's the like final review of the makeover. And then it always links back to that longer video of the whole process. Right. And so you're using that short form to get engagement, to point people back to things. So if you have like a large library of content like we have in our bird feeder course, Catalog, you know, how do you take videos or sessions we ran three years ago that maybe irrelevant again? We want to put it in front of people. Maybe we have a ton of new hires and we want to put it in front of people again. Maybe instead of a post that says, hey, we did this thing, you should go watch it, do you pull out a minute of that video? So, for example, we've got Earth Week coming up. Our sustainability group is going to be running a bunch of stuff and they want to point at a session we did on healthier materials a couple years ago. So do you pull a minute out of that video that's like, what is a red list? What does it mean? Why is it important? You throw that in a post and you say, hey, is this interesting to you? There's a whole video that talks more about it, you know, and then it doesn't even have to be a single post. You could do three of them. You could pull different things out of the video that target different audiences and then use that as like a natural way to point to your previous content. So that's kind of what we're exploring right now. I went through this pretty fast, Susan, but I just kind of wanted to like show people kind of what we're looking at. And really it's just a little bit of creativity and a little bit of empathy I think can go a long way for meeting your users like where they are rather than feeling like everything in your knowledge management has to be perfect. I mean, we are learning how to do knowledge management while we do knowledge management.

Yeah. This is so good. Thank you so much, Jess.

Thank you.

I feel like he just gives a lot of fodder to dig deeper into. And they're in the, in the questions panel. So I'm going to jump in on something that I think like three people have written in about, which is like how. I guess the question is how do you make those short form videos? But I think it's a little bigger than that. It's like, who's doing it? Are you doing it? Are you teaching others to do it? Is there specific technology that you recommend others do?

Yeah, you know, that's something I really should have talked about. So we've been using clipchamp, which interestingly is now Clipchamp for business is integrated in SharePoint. So if you did a team's call and you recorded it, you go to that recording in stream and there's a button for just edit and clickchamp and then that automatically will save in the SharePoint of if you did that in a teams channel or it does it in your OneDrive and you can move it somewhere. And that's been like really easy because like Premiere and a lot of Adobe products are a high learning curve and this is really just like very minimal editing. They're going to have branding opportunities soon. So like you can build in your brand color palette. But right now we just kind of hex pick from like our color palette which is fine and is also on Finch. But so yes, Clipchamp has been amazing for this because everybody has access to it. You can get to it directly from the video. We are looking at also thinking a little bit about AI so that healthy materials example rather than going back to the sustainable design group and be like, hey, you ran this thing two years ago and it's an hour long. What parts do you remember of it that you want to clip out that you think are important? You know, is it possible to pull a transcript which is auto generated in stream and have someone maybe who's new to the content review it and pick stuff out and that's a learning opportunity for them. Or use AI to be like, summarize this and pick 10 key points for me. Then we're going to the sustainable design group and saying here's 10. What is probably a 30 second clip, pick two. And then it's like it's very low effort for them. Again, you can have admins or even level ones or emerging professionals develop the skills to do video. Emerging professionals, if they're younger and just out of school, they're maybe video native. And so this is super easy for them to understand. How do you edit something down really small. But again that learning opportunity of they have to be so immersed in the content to edit it down and teach it out. It's just another form of like that learn to teach. So it doesn't have to be the content experts doing this. And that's kind of part of what we're figuring out right now that's so interesting.

So I think what I'm hearing is like the people who have the expertise to teach the hour long course are not necessarily the best editors.

Yeah, I mean they could be and if they are, go for it. But it doesn't have to be them doing the whole thing in the same way that we build bird feeder to support them. Like the effort they should be putting in is to building the content and teaching. They shouldn't have to worry about sending the invites, scheduling, posting to Finch, updating the course catalog. Like that's not a good use of their Time.

I wonder if you talk more about who's. Whose time for whom. That is the best use of their time. Like who's responsible for that? I noticed when we were in the bird feeder, we. Or sorry, not in bird feeder. In the. The team, the kind of Internet team.

Group community.

There were 70 or so members.

Yeah.

Who are getting done. And I'd love for you to speak a little bit to how that group has evolved, how you're coaching them, how you're onboarding them. Your current role and what. And what your role will be, I think with this group. Because that's an evolution as well.

Yeah. I think it's interesting talking with other people who are using synthesis, like civil tech, where they have this community for community managers. But that's a team of eight people. Turner Fleischer goes the route of like, they have about eight people and everything goes through Marco and Kayla. We don't have a specific knowledge management team. We also have a lot of people who are used to managing their own content. So again, that, like meeting people where they are. But yeah, when I set this up and I added everybody who has edit rights, coming up with that number of 63 is mildly terrifying. Terrifying. When we were in synthesis five, though, it was. Everyone had edit rights everywhere. So this is less. But really what we're looking at here is anyone with edit rights and people only have edit rights within their community. So if you think about it that way, it's a little less scary. It's like five people have edit rights to a very small chunk of Fitch. So it is very broad to look at this page and be like, you have 63 people responsible for editing Finch. And they're not. Every community has a community manager that is directing the people within the group who are doing the physical content editing. Again, those experts don't necessarily have the time to update the pages, but they do have the knowledge to verify that the content on the pages is good. And today. Yeah.

Yeah. And then you.

Right.

You're kind of a key person.

Yes. Yeah. So I miss, like, what are.

What are your roles?

Yeah. So I'm kind of a person who wears a lot of hats, and I'm sure a lot of people on this call can relate to that. So I do basically what the business needs at any given time. So for Finch migration, it was definitely like, we need someone to oversee this. I also feel like a lot of what I do is kind of shadow posting and ghostwriting for people. All of the design technology is within the IT department. So I'm overhead I am it, but I do design, technology, knowledge right now, all that stuff. And so it's really just like people want to hear from their peers. Like, it makes sense for practice to be owning Finch, not it, because when it owns something, it's me telling you to do something. Whereas when practice owns something, it's people conveying to their peers the value that it adds to their work. So I did a decent amount of work on this, but I by no means manage or really own it. We own it as a practice. And so a lot of my role post migration is really about checking in with people, being a resource to help them, making sure someone's getting everybody to get eyes on their content. So we're working through like, what does a review process look like that doesn't involve like us having to sit down and look at everything all the time? I don't know what that looks like yet, but we're thinking it's probably once a year we sit with community managers and make sure they've just looked out on their pages. We ended up with a lot of nine years of cleaning out closets and a lot of stuff that when we moved it over and our new community managers or even existing community managers saw stuff that they didn't even know they had. So, yeah, I would say it's less like I own it and more of I support people to own it themselves and everybody kind of collaborates. But it wasn't always this way. I think that is the nature of the fact that we've been doing this for 10 years and it is so much part of the culture that Finch is everyone's.

Yeah, it's a journey and it evolves over time. I'm noticing that we have a bunch of questions in the Q and A panel, so we're going to punch through them. But something that everyone who has questions can do to help us prioritize is you can upvote questions that are of greater interest to you. So invite folks to review the questions and upvote ones that you'd really like to hear about. All right, I'm going to shift gears a little bit following one of the questions back to the Design Exchange that you showed. So the question is, how do you get buy in from members to contribute to the working groups like design exchange. JNO's complex answer, because it's going to be different for Design Exchange than for the Revit user group, you know, the Design Exchange, because I think design conversations are something a lot of firms want to get going. And then so the, the audience Question was how do you get buy in? I had another question about Design Exchange, which was to do the layout that you have here with links to the activity stream filtered on a hashtag. You need people to not only engage, but to tag consistently. I know they've been engaging for a long time. I was wondering if that tagging behavior is a new behavior you had to help them get into or if they just do it on their own. So just talk about them.

Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. So a lot of our call them Finch natives. They, they know all about tags. Tags are natural to them. Filtering on a tag, it makes sense to them. DX is really interesting because, you know, it feels like there's a lot of conversations and the conversations are natural. But I mean the book club is run by three people and those three people are posting about the book club and they always know this Haggit Archetypes wasn't necessarily a top down decision. It was two people within DX decided, hey, this is something that would be fun to do. Both of these folks are emerging professionals. So they're not even like our high level design experts in the firm. Right. They're just people who are really passionate about design and have decided to do this. And it lives under DX because they're part of dx, but also it's conversation about design. So in the same way again I talked about Finch is owned by the community. Like no one told these two to start doing this. As far as I know they were passionate. They were like, I want to do this, can we do this? And they started doing it. So again it's easy for them to create and curate that hashtag because it didn't exist before. I think there's probably other examples out there like rug, where it's like a lot of people posting into it or even sustainability. Right. But then that's where it's kind of that higher level like feed of like you're tagging sustainability in it. Not necessarily like a specific initiative, but having those like autofill tags. So if you wanted to talk about healthy materials, you just start typing it and it populates like any of the ones you might need. I actually find that we have a harder time if we want to curate a hashtag keeping people from using it. So like New Finch on our like welcome to New Finch page, we have all this. The posts we ran about New Finch and people were really excited about New Finch and so when they would like post something they'd be like, oh hey, like now that we're on NewFinch. Hashtag New Finch. So I'd have to go through and actually, like, untag some of these posts. Right. It's just so much of, like, people just get it now. But also, we've been doing this for 10 years, and it wasn't always like this.

Yeah. Someone asked a question kind of about the fact that you've been doing it for 10 years, and the question is like, well, I'll read it. Can you talk about how you got from the start of the journey 10 years ago to, like, gain momentum to get where you are today? And I know that's a big question, but if you have a thought on that, that might help someone else who's in that beginning journey, kind of imagine how they get from there to how they get to where you are or this level of adoption and engagement.

I think.

I think folks are interested.

You know, sometimes it's one of those things where it's like, it's been around so long, you have a hard time thinking back then. And also, I used to be like, oh, well, I wasn't here when it started, but I came in at year two. So really, when we're at 10 and eight years, like, I've been here for most of Finch, and again, a lot of it is that, like, background pushing. So we find people who aren't posting regularly or we hear conversations. We have a lot of really vibrant communities talking on teams. And so it's like, if we see something on teams that really, like, could be on Finch, or we're talking with a project team and they have, like, a really interesting story, it's a lot of like, hey, can you post that to Finch? People get really annoyed with me and Jim Martin, because I'm always going to ask you, like, man, that would be really great to see on Finch for design technology. I actually leverage the fact that we're helping teams and doing things for them. And it's like, if I've made something new for you, or we figured something out, you owe me payment in the form of a FINCH post. And sometimes, again, people are busy. You know, you can offer to ghostwrite for them. And that goes, like, one of three ways, which, like, they take it and they're like, great. They take it and they're like, oh, this is. This isn't what I want. But it gets over that hump of, like, how do I start writing this? And then they write their own. Or the third is like, oh, I don't want you to write it. And then they, like, write it themselves, like, because they don't want you to ghost. Right. But it's making it easier for people to do things. Change really can't be like you need to change. It has to be. How can I make it easier for you to do this thing that people know that it's good, they want to share, they want to hear from other people. It's just about time, right? Or maybe if they're not like so established in their career, a comfort level thing. Which is why again, seeing like emerging professionals post weekly about good design is like, that's making it so that everyone feels comfortable to post. Right. So yeah, a lot of what I do actually never has my face on it and it's always from your peers. But a lot of it, again, it's making it easier for people to do the things they'd like to be able to do. They're not not posting to Finch because they don't want to. Some people are. But a lot of it is time and not knowing where to start and not feeling comfortable with the skill set. Yeah.

And something just you and I spoke about that I thought was just really fascinating about how you interact and your role in is that you're doing all this stuff behind the scenes to kind of pull people up the change curve of like, I know this is what you want. We all know that if we made this change would be happier, but it's uncomfortable. So like I'm going to ghostwrite the post. I'm going to remind you I'm going to do the things we're like pulling them up and then stop and they're like, oh, this is, this is what I do now. And you kind of slide down the other side of the change curve and then you go on to the next project you go needs change. So you, you don't have the luxury of like staying with all those changes, you know, forever and ever. You have to hand them back and like let them roll with it so you can go do another one. Which is a little different than someone who maybe has like a, you know, full time knowledge manager role where they're kind of needing to stay with it is their job, you know, or sometimes it's their job. So it's just a very interesting perspective. I think a really valuable one for the community here because I think there's a lot of people who do not have a full time KM role who are doing what you're doing is like success through others. Get them, get them to a point where they're good and then let them go and go on to the next.

I would challenge that, that knowledge managers are always doing the same thing. Because if knowledge managers were always working with the Revit user group to run debates, they don't have time to do other things. So they are getting that group up to speed on how to run things themselves so they can move to the next group and help them learn how to share. It's just in a different bubble than what I do, and my bubble happens to be way too big and I'm stressed out. So there's a lot of things I should maybe be letting go of. But a lot of it is like recognizing when something is not the best use of your time. Your time is really most effective in teaching people how to do it for themselves or how to do it for others. So an example I didn't even talk about in this, but we have a group in addition to Bird Feeder called Hatchery, and that's kind of our business problem solving and new idea platform, fun embeds. I put Power Bi stuff in our Finch boards, too. That's a live Power Bi dashboard of hatchery submissions. We don't have to update that, but I'm a big part of Hatchery because we're still trying to figure out that process. But at some point, it doesn't make sense for me to be in Hatchery and solving other people's problems when I have to solve so many of my own problems or things that only I can solve. So really, for me, Hatchery right now is teaching people in the practice how to do what I do so that they can solve their problems and I can move on to other problems. So that's. That's very meta. Yeah, but it's one of the things I love about Hatchery is like, we are democratizing the process of change within the firm. Anybody can do it. You just maybe need someone to walk you through it.

All right, hard left. There's a question that has more upvotes than any other question, so I'm going to go ahead and ask it, which is about synthesis LMS. Are you considering the new LMS with synthesis in 2025?

Yeah, we are, but something you and I talked about is your users don't know that that's coming in 2025. Or if they do know, they don't care because they want to learn right now.

I mean, you said you're using bullfinches like Shepley employees.

Exactly, yeah. Our users. You as a synthesis customer, your users want to learn stuff right now. You can spend a lot of time being like, oh, how Do I set this up? That migration will be fast. We did a lot of that when we were working on stuff in five, and we found that those actually were harder to migrate to six because we had to unbuild what we built and rebuild it. But some of the hard work had already been done about how to organize it. So really, you can't always plan for. You should know something's coming and plan for the future, but you gotta meet your users where they are right now. And so, like I said, for Birdfeeder, the choice to go with just pages of stuff, that's because right now we don't have the synthesis lms, but this is the way that we feel comfortable getting things to our users. It's a little more work for admins because they have to build pages for everything. But again, your. Your people at the funnel and your audience, your customer, your users, whatever you want to call them, they just care about learning, and they just want things given to them in a way that makes it easier for them to access, to find, to search, to consume. Mm.

Yeah. Thank you.

We'll deal with the problem of migration when it. When we have to migrate, like, we do everything.

Yeah, yeah. And more news to come on LMS as we. All right, we have time for one more questions. One more question. There's one about the teams link, so I'll read it. The teams link for knowledge groups, are they just info pages or directed to the Teams app?

That's a great question. Yes, they go directly to the Teams app. So Revit user group's a good example. We have. And we had a problem early pandemic where we had a huge flood of help desk tickets in it of people needing help with Revit because they no longer had the person next to them to turn to and ask a question. So how do we solve that problem? You know, you think like, okay, we have a. We have a hashtag for Ask Finch. And people look at it and they respond. But asking for a, I don't know how to do this thing is different than a, hey, does someone have advice on, like, how to use this material or a detail for this? It's much more vulnerable. So we actually built a team site that our Revit user group Core, which is like our kind of managing group that manages all the content on Finch, they actually come through and they watch this and they answer people's questions. So in some ways, we were concerned about the fracturing of conversations not happening on Finch and moving to teams. But in another way, if the end goal is people communicating and coming together and answering questions and sharing. Doesn't matter where it happens, if it's findable. So that idea of like, oh, I'm coming to rug. I'm looking for information on how to do something. I'm noticing this is a lot of announcements, but I see there's a team site. I can go to the team site, join it, and I can see all the conversations that are happening. Ideally, you know, how do you search that? Figure that out. But. And that, like, empathy and grace of like, it's okay, I guess, that you're sharing on teams because you're so involved in sharing with each other. So how do I just make it so that you can get there from Finch? So people who don't know about your team site or where you have one. Not all our groups have them, but any group that does, it's always bottom row. First column of the Snap blog. Yeah. With that icon. Nice.

Well, thank you for taking us into that. I know that's a question that many firms ask, and that brings us to the end of our time together. Jess, this is so much fun. Thank you for sharing me doing this great work, bringing us behind the scenes on it. Really appreciate your time. The recording of today's tour will be posted on our website and in the online community and sent out via email next week or the week after. If you want to share this with anybody, we have upcoming events available on our website, including the program for K Connect, which just got posted today. And that is a wrap for today's time. Thank you again for joining us for all the great questions. I'm sorry we didn't get to get to all of them. I really appreciate them and we look forward to seeing you at the next one. Take care. All by Jess.

Thanks.